If I could get out there, I’d be able to belly flop and splash. I knew I could. Hadn’t I already learned how to swim today? The serene stretch of intervening lake beckoned. “You can do it. I’ll help. I’m like a table now, that you can crawl across.”
Goose pimples covered my arms. I was growing cold, standing still. If I swam, I’d get warm again. I could just start to swim toward the raft. If I felt tired, I could turn around and swim back. Beverly would do it. Beverly wouldn’t stand around all night like a scared baby, hugging herself and growing cold.
I began inching forward, advancing almost imperceptibly, the water rising on my body until it was beneath my arms. Then, giving a hop to launch myself, I started to swim toward the raft. Right away I knew I had made a mistake. I had waited too late in the day. I was tired all over, especially my arms. And I was cold. Numbed and leaden, my limbs were less and less willing. No matter how hard I drove them, they barely moved. But without a solid place to put my foot down, I couldn’t turn around. I didn’t know how.
Would anyone notice? There was a Knight, Mr. Beverton, who had spent the day watching out for swimmers in trouble. Would he see me? Would he know I was in trouble? Although it was late and the sun’s red rays lay slantwise across the darkening lake, there were still many picnickers in the water.
I wasn’t sure I could call out. I had almost no wind left, and I couldn’t keep my head out of the water for more than a moment. That moment was needed for gulping air. As my arms and legs grew weaker and my body sank lower into the water, it was more difficult to raise my head high enough to breathe.
If Mr. Beverton noticed me at all, how did I look? Did I look like someone who knew how to swim and was making her way to the raft? Or did I look like a beginner: tired, in trouble, and about to drown?
Wouldn’t it be nice if Mr. Beverton got into his rowboat and, without making a fuss, rowed out to me and said, “I know you don’t need help, but would you like a ride in my rowboat?”
If a fuss were made, Papa would find out and I’d be in trouble. He’d never let me forget. If it were known that Mr. Beverton had had to save me, Papa would be embarrassed and angry. His embarrassment and anger would be multiplied by the number of people who had seen, who knew that I had nearly drowned. It would be a reflection on him. Some people might even blame him. If I could find the strength to call, I still wouldn’t.
But if I drowned, what about my soul? I remembered the long list of sins, mortal and venial, neatly entered in my notebook. My soul was bound for hell. And Papa would inevitably find the notebook. He would discover the sort of child I had been. Even dead, I didn’t think I could face that disgrace and humiliation, that betrayal of him.
In the watery blur of my visions, outer and inner, a hand appeared, reaching for me, grasping hold of my hand and tugging mercilessly. Something hard edged slammed into my chest and a raspy, boyish voice exclaimed, “Godsakes.”
Eventually, between us, we hauled me onto the raft. I lay there for a long time, only vaguely aware of children squealing, gently rocking the raft with the vigor of their play. A pleasant, drunken inertia overcame me. It wasn’t only that I couldn’t move, I couldn’t think. Over me Beverly’s voice declared, scolded, advised, but she might as well have been in Red Berry for all that I could hear.
As I lay nearly passed out on the wet raft, twilight fell. One by one the children swam back to shore. Parents called, loons cried, dim lights winked on in the park. The merry-go-round lights blazed, and its music pounded across the water and seemed to shake the very earth beneath the lake.
“It’s getting dark,” Beverly pointed out. “Mr. Beverton’s gonna call us to come in. We gotta go back.”
“I can’t.”
“Godsakes. You shouldn’t’ve swimmed out here. You just learned today. That was stupid.”
“You go,” I told her. I was shivering and my teeth chattered so that I could hardly get the words out.
“You want me to send Mr. Beverton out?”
“No! Don’t tell Mr. Beverton.”
“Why not?”
“Because.”
“Godsakes.”
“Tell Mama to get me.”
“What about your pa?”
“No!”
Beverly belly flopped into the water and was gone. I was too sleepy to watch her. Willingly I slipped down into a profound unconsciousness. I didn’t hear Mama’s voice or Beverly’s. Then Beverly was shaking me hard, impatiently. “Get up. Your ma’s here.”
With great effort I moved my head, laying my face down on the other cheek. In the purple gloom Mama sat in a rowboat, Mr. Beverton’s, her hands at the oars, keeping the boat tightly alongside the raft.
“Get up, Lark,” she said in a serious, subdued voice.
Beverly pulled my arm hard enough to loosen it from the socket. As I struggled to my knees, she held onto me. “Sit on the edge of the raft,” she told me, “and put your feet in the boat.”
I did exactly as I was told because I was not able to form an independent thought. It was all I could do to hang on to Beverly’s simple words and interpret them. With Beverly and Mama both helping, I finally lumbered into the rowboat, falling in a heap between two seats.
“Here’s your towel,” Beverly said, putting it around my shoulders.
Later, I found myself lying in the back of the truck, Beverly in her overalls sitting beside me, bouncing down the road to town. I was feeling very bad. My face was burning and my head throbbed. The rest of me, despite an old blanket, was freezing. My stomach began to rise ominously. I pounded on the cab. The pickup ground to a halt. Hanging my head over the side, I threw up. Mama climbed down out of the cab and came around to the back. She held my head, then wiped my face with the towel. “Done?”
I nodded and lay down. Beverly moved to make room for Mama, and we were on our way again, the truck jouncing and swaying, the night air rushing past.
“Where’s Beverly?” I demanded, waking in my crib, dressed in my nightie.
“Papa took her home.”
There was a knock at the kitchen door. Mama hurried to answer.
“Well, now, where’s the patient?” an avuncular voice inquired. As if Dr. White didn’t know. As if he hadn’t been here dozens of times. Between October and May, I never had fewer than four bouts of tonsillitis or bronchial pneumonia. “You took her temperature?”
“It’s a hundred and four on our thermometer,” Mama said. They were in the kitchen. “I can’t help thinking about… President Roosevelt,” Mama stammered. Though I was drifting in and out of sleep, I was sure I’d heard right. President Roosevelt?
“I wouldn’t worry,” the doctor assured her, seeming to know what Mama meant.
His dry, cool hand was on my brow, my cheek. His fingers were lifting my eyelids. “Open,” he said, sticking a thermometer in my mouth. “Keep it under your tongue. Don’t talk.”
My eyelids were heavy and swollen feeling, so I kept them closed. The bed springs whined as Mama sat on the edge of the bed, waiting.
“She was in the water a long time today,” she told the doctor. “Too long. I was busy and not paying enough attention.”
“Whatever it is, today didn’t cause it,” he said.
“I don’t know. Hadn’t Roosevelt been swimming? So many people seem to get… sick after they’ve been swimming. She got overtired, I know that. She couldn’t even sit up on the way home.”
After the thermometer came out, Dr. White grasped me under the arms. “Sit up now, Lark, so I can have a look at that throat.”
Mama carried the bedside lamp and held it high. Dr. White took out his little flashlight and his tongue depressor. “How does your throat feel?” he asked.
“Hurts.”
“Hmmmm,” he murmured, studying my throat, this way and that, asking me to say “ahhhh,” directing the light from Mama’s lamp more to the left. Then he snapped off his flashlight and felt my glands. Straightening at last, he said, “Looks like the same old problem to
me. I’m not going to paint her throat tonight. I’ll stop in tomorrow and have another look. Give her an aspirin now and take her temperature again in an hour. If it goes higher, call me.”
Mama followed him into the kitchen and saw him to the door, thanking him for coming, relief melting her voice almost to tearfulness. It was as though she credited the doctor with warding off the dreadful contingency having to do with President Roosevelt.
“I was planning to go to my sister’s in a couple of weeks,” Mama told the doctor. “She’s expecting around the first of July, and she’s had a hard time. Do you think Lark will be able to go?”
“Hard to say. I’ll be able to tell more in a day or two.”
But I have to be there when the stork comes. I’ve got to catch the baby.
14
FOR THE NEXT FOUR or five days, I was flat in my crib. Dr. White returned to paint my throat four days running. I made a scene every time, crying and begging, but I might as well have saved my energy.
For the first week, it was soup and tea and tea and soup, and late in the afternoon, for a treat, a tall glass of Coca-Cola with ice and a straw. The day after the picnic, Beverly came calling. I heard Mama at the door.
“She okay?” Beverly asked.
“She has a bad case of tonsillitis,” Mama told her, “but she’ll be well in a couple of weeks.”
“Godsakes.”
“I don’t want you to catch Lark’s germs,” Mama explained, “but maybe you could put your head in and say hello. Don’t go near the crib,” she warned.
Beverly poked her head in the doorway. “You still sick?”
I nodded. It hurt to talk.
“You know that money you had after you paid for the tilt-a-whirl?”
I couldn’t remember.
“It was with your towel. I went down to Lundeen’s.” From behind her overalls she pulled a big, thick coloring book with a mama and baby giraffe on the cover. “I think it’s about California or someplace where there’s lions and elephants and alligators.” She heaved the book across the room and into the crib.
“It’s real nice,” I whispered.
“You got Crayolas?”
Again I nodded.
“Then I’ll come back and color with you. Don’t color all the pages.” She turned and was gone.
In the kitchen Mama said, “It was nice of you to bring Lark a present. Would you like some cookies before you leave?”
“Yes.”
I heard Mama getting milk from the refrigerator and cookies from the cupboard.
“What’s this thing called again?” Beverly asked.
“A typewriter,” Mama told her.
“What’re you doing with it?”
“Teaching myself to type.”
“Why?”
“So I’ll be ready for a job when one comes along.”
“You any good at it?”
“Not yet. I want to type fifty words a minute. I type about ten right now.”
“Think you’ll make it?”
“Yes, I will,” Mama told her.
Friday morning Mama drove to school to pick up my report card. “Mrs. Rath was sorry to hear that you were sick.” Mrs. Rath worked in the office.
“Is my report card good?” I asked from the crib, where I was coloring in the new coloring book.
“It’s fine.”
I put down the yellow crayon with which I’d been filling in the basking lion on page thirteen. Something must be wrong if the report card was only fine. Was it printing again? That was my bad subject. “Can I see it?” I had to absorb my failure through my own eyes, surrounding it wholly with my senses. If I imprinted it seriously on myself, like a tattoo, next year it would be a reminder to do better.
Mama handed me the card. Everything was A or Excellent, except for printing. The damned printing was A-minus. “Do we have to show Papa?”
“I’ll put it away. If he asks, I’ll show it to him. If he doesn’t, I won’t.” She slipped it into her top bureau drawer, under the hankies.
Papa thought I was fooling around if my marks weren’t straight A’s. “If you were doing what you’re supposed to, you’d have an A in printing,” he’d told me when I brought home my last report card with a B-plus in printing. “I’m going to tell your teacher to phone me up when you’re not doing what you’re supposed to.” I never knew if he told her or not. “I have ways of finding out when you’re bad,” Papa had told me more than once. “People tell me.”
“What people?”
“That’s for me to know.”
Maybe one of Papa’s spies would tell him that Mama had picked up my report card. I didn’t feel like coloring anymore, so I slipped into the garden in the clock and discovered a pair of roller skates beside the dutch door to the cottage. Strapping them on and tightening the clamps with the key, I flew down the tree-shaded street, breezes lifting my hair and whipping my skirt as I clicked along.
Mama brought me supper on a tray again. Vegetable soup and oyster crackers, and tea with honey. I listened carefully to the conversation in the kitchen, but Papa didn’t mention my report card. On Sunday, he said, he was going fishing with Mr. Navarin and Mr. Navarin’s son, Danny, who drove a truck for Sinclair. He talked about Mr. Navarin’s new outboard motor and how he wished he had one like it.
There had been a letter that day from Grandma Erhardt. Grandpa was laid up with a bad cold, she said. She hoped to see us all in July, if not before. This year’s garden was the best they’d ever put in, and she would have plenty of fresh vegetables by the time we came, including “the little yellow tomatoes Lark likes so much.”
Mama and Papa discussed a trip to New Frankfurt to visit Grandma and Grandpa. “After I get back from Betty’s,” Mama said. “With Lark sick now, that’s the soonest I can go.”
As Papa was preparing to return to the depot office, Mama told him that she was going to call on Mrs. Stillman to give Hilly our present. “Lark will be all right. If she needs anything, she’ll knock on the wall.”
“What present is that?” Papa wanted to know.
“Lark bought Hilly an ocarina at the white elephant booth.”
“What for?”
“Because he marched so well in the parade. Didn’t you notice?”
“He didn’t pee in his pants or fall down and foam at the mouth,” Papa said, laughing.
Before she left, Mama told me, “The potty and toilet paper are under the crib if you need to go before I’m back.”
“Can I write a note to Hilly?”
Mama got paper and pencil, and I wrote a letter, with some help in spelling.
Dear Hilly,
How are you? I am fine except I have tonsillitis. You marched very well, and I am proud to know you.
Love,
Lark Ann Browning Erhardt
It was A-plus printing, Mama said.
While Mama was out, I pored over the house plans, comparing each plan with the charming and suitable #127—The Cape Ann. There were always fresh details to be noted in the various designs—a particularly well-placed back hall closet or the clever way in which foundation plantings were used.
I’d got through only one of the booklets when Mama returned. “Hilly missed you,” she said, coming into the bedroom to give me a report. “He was hoping you’d come with your book. Mrs. Stillman says he talks about—what was it, something to do with pansies and a garden.”
“‘Peggy Among the Pansies.’ That’s the story I read him.”
“Well, evidently it pleased him. And you told him we were going to build a house, and he could come and pick flowers.” Mama handed me a picture torn roughly from a magazine. It was an advertisement for face soap. A woman was holding a bouquet of flowers to her face. “Hilly sent that to you.”
“Did he like the ocarina?”
“He started playing it right away. Mrs. Stillman had to send him into the bedroom so we could talk.”
“I wish we had our house so Hilly could come visit us and pick flower
s. When do you think we’ll get the house?”
“As soon as I make some money. Then you and I are going to march over to Rayzeen’s Lumberyard and order our house.”
I pictured Mama and me, hand in hand, marching down dusty Fourth Street, our house plan in Mama’s purse.
“We’ll step right up to Mr. Rayzeen’s desk,” she continued, “and drop that house plan in front of him and say, ‘We want one of those, as soon as you’re able. And it had better be ready before the snow flies.’”
Mama shook down the thermometer. “Open,” she said, and put it under my tongue. “A hundred and two,” she read, removing it minutes later. “That’s too much.”
She brought aspirin, a jar of Vicks, and a piece of old, soft flannel. Next she carried in a bowl of cold water with ice cubes in it and set it on her bedside table.
“Do I have to have the cold rag, Mama?” My voice sounded awful, even to me.
This was one of Grandma Browning’s cures. First, you slathered a lot of Vicks on the sick person’s neck. Then you put an old cloth or towel in the ice water, wringing it out and wrapping it around the patient’s neck, over the Vicks. On top of the wet cloth you wound a dry towel and left it on over night. Although I hated it, I had to admit that it did seem to help.
When Mama had me all ready for the night, she began unloading the crib. There were house plan booklets, Happy Stories for Bedtime, Crayolas, and the coloring book Beverly had given me. A nagging little thought surfaced.
“How much did that coloring book cost, Mama?”
The price was printed on the upper, right-hand corner of the cover. “Twenty-five cents,” she told me.
“Is twenty-five cents a quarter?”
“Yes.”
Papa had given me a quarter, and I had bought three rides on the tilt-a-whirl for Beverly, so there hadn’t been twenty-five cents with my towel when she found it. Beverly never had any money of her own, so where had she got the extra? She had gone to some trouble to get me that present.
The Cape Ann Page 13